It began in a pile of paper: letters with strong sentiments scratched into them, pages of inky philosophy addressed to newspapers and journals. As it picked up momentum it whirled around the houses of London’s authorities, Justice John Fielding and Saunders Welch, the High Constable of Holborn. It blew in through the windows of wealthy leaders of business, upstanding men such as Robert Dingley and Jonas Hanway. Concerned parties began to gather in order to discuss what might be done. By the beginning of 1758 such a gale of good intention had been whipped up that, within the year, it threatened to sweep away Jack Harris and his empire forever.It was not Jack Harris in particular that the founders of the Magdalen charity targeted, but rather those on his list. Their purpose was to quell the spread of prostitution through a course of reformation – their desire: ‘to induce women who have lived as prostitutes to forsake their evil course of life’. For this they proposed opening a hospital (what now might be considered a refuge or rehabilitation centre) based along the lines of that opened for orphaned children by Thomas Coram a decade earlier.
